http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/magazine/why-is-us-womens-soccer-still-fighting-to-exist.html?_r=0
Why Is U.S. Women’s Soccer Still Fighting to Exist?
By JAIME LOWE JUNE 5, 2015
… They went on to lose to Japan in the finals, but the match was watched by more people in the United States than the Kentucky Derby.
A men’s team coming off that kind of performance — and TV ratings — would arrive home to seven-figure European club contracts and endorsement deals. But the U.S. women returned to a professional league that was on its deathbed; Women’s Professional Soccer folded the following January. It was the second U.S. women’s soccer league to go bust since 1999.
On Saturday, the women’s team will once again head to the Women’s World Cup with bright prospects and an impressive audience; the team attracted five times as many fans to its sold-out exhibition games in 2015 as it did in 2011. “We have the potential to be the best league in the world,” Julie Foudy, an ESPN soccer analyst and former member of the women’s national team, told me. But what happens when the World Cup is over? The women’s professional league still pays as little as $6,000 per 20-week season, with a salary cap around $30,000, so little that the U.S., Canadian and Mexican federations have agreed to subsidize their countries’ players to play on their respective national teams.
Why is U.S. women’s soccer still fighting to exist? Part of the problem is FIFA. The sport’s embattled world authority and the national federations with a voting interest in the organization have refused to provide women with an equal playing field, quite literally: This year’s World Cup, in Canada, will be played on artificial turf. That decision prompted a group of female players — 84 players representing 13 countries — to sue FIFA for gender discrimination (though they withdrew the complaint earlier this year); no professional male player, after all, would be willing to play on artificial turf in any tournament, let alone in the World Cup. (Nor did any male soccer star step in to support or testify on behalf of the female athletes.)
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Sponsors and advertisers, too, have failed to show up in numbers anywhere close to men’s soccer. More than 400 million people worldwide saw at least part of the women’s 2011 Cup. These figures lag behind the men’s cup, the most widely watched sporting event in the world — nearly a billion people tuned into the final alone in 2010 — but the ad revenues lag much further behind: The 2011 Cup brought in just $5.8 million, while the men’s cup in 2014 netted $1.4 billion. Fox Sports, which is carrying this year’s World Cup, says it has already tripled 2011’s revenues, but the numbers are still far apart. This imbalance trickles down to the prize money as well. The German team that won the men’s tournament in 2014 took home $25 million more than the Japanese women’s team that won in 2011.
If there’s an analogue for the plight, and potential, of women’s soccer today, it’s women’s tennis in the 1970s. At the time, women had no professional circuit to speak of. When women were allowed to play in tournaments, the pioneering champion Billie Jean King recalled in a recent interview, they were paid an eighth of the prize money that men were.
King spent three years building what ultimately became the Women’s Tennis Association, with no support from professional male players and at times little support even from some of her female colleagues. She organized a league with infrastructure, pay scale, tournaments and player protection that worked a lot like a union. “We realized this could have been the end of our tennis careers, but we had the courage to draw the line in the sand, not just for us but for the future,” King told me. “We needed to convince players to belong to something.”
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There is some hope that this year’s World Cup could change things for the better in the United States. Members of the U.S. women’s national team are making appearances on “American Idol” and striking poses on building-size ads off Times Square. Last week, EA Sports and FIFA announced that “FIFA 16,” the latest version of their popular video game, which receives part of the credit for the recent boom in men’s World Cup viewership in the United States, will feature 12 women’s teams. The trailer for the game is a bracing montage of slides, steals, headers, high fives and turf, presumably the real kind, flying through the air. It’s the kind of celebration of athletic prowess, ambition and ego that we’re accustomed to seeing lavished on male athletes, not female ones. It’s a little sad when virtual reality is aspirational, but it feels like the beginning of something for which we’ve been waiting for far too long.
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